Today is our last day in Hiroshima before we leave for China tomorrow night! We have spent three days in Hiroshima and it has already been such an amazing experience from The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to hula dancing at the Buddhist temple.
We arrived in Hiroshima on the afternoon of the 14th and we had dinner at a Buddhist temple an hour away from our hotel. We chanted a prayer with the temple priest and then we were given a tour of the temple. Then, a group of ladies from the temple women's guild performed a hula dance for us! They gave an excellent performance and made a delicious dinner for us.
The next day, we took a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum which retold the events of the atomic bombing on August 6th, 1945. All of us were shocked by the destruction and the amount of innocent lives lost that day. One object that impacted many of us was an old, rusty tricycle. It belonged to a three-year old boy who was riding his tricycle when the bomb went off and killed him. The father buried the tricycle with his son until he dug it out and donated it to the museum 40 years later. This story and many others like it give just a small glimpse into the total effect the bomb had on this city.
Today, on our last day in Hiroshima, we took a ferry out to the city of Miyajima. The city is famous for its very friendly deer that roam the city streets. If you have some delicious smelling food, watch out or the deer might try to eat it! We got to see the famous Shinto shrine in the water and explore the temple before a group of us went up to Mount Misen where the Buddhist saint Kobo-daishi founded the first Shingon temple in Japan. The view from the top of Mount Misen is absolutely breathtaking and you feel like you're on top of the world.
Hiroshima is definitely a special place for all of us on this course. We experienced the euphoria of reaching the top of a mountain and the sadness of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. We have made so many good memories in the past two weeks, but it's time to say sayonara to Japan and ni hao to China!
